stoppingby4now

Thanks for that Vond, I'm going to try your DoF (only thing I want aside from the shadows). The one I've been using so far is a bit stronger than I want, and I haven't even looked at how to change it yet.

I've seen autoupdate capability in the latter 200 series drivers' date=' but I don't know if it works. I never install that feature.[/quote']This is new software that is gonna use a new nvidia cloud database to store all game info and all hardware info and autoconfigure your game profiles and drivers to get max quality from each game you have installed on your specific system according to your full hardware specs. Still pie in the sky' date=' but at least they are trying something new.[/quote']Ahh, hadn't heard of that. I can see the appeal of that as you wouldn't need to wait for new drivers to get new game support.Yes, you would. That software has nothing do with new drivers' support for recent games.You don't need recent drivers to support most new games, but you want them for the optimizations and official profile support. If they do this right, there is nothing stopping them from being able to provide intermediary profiles for new games before a new driver is released. I just watched the key note speech with Jen-Hsun Huang, and he subtly hinted at this capability.

I haven't tried any weather effects yet with RCRN 3.0. I hope More Rain works as I prefer the heavy and dark rain.

Temporarily disable RCRN and see if it still causes CTD's. Did you also make sure to set the enbseries.ini to read only? If you don't, ENB will repopulate it with missing data and it may cause problems.

I've seen autoupdate capability in the latter 200 series drivers' date=' but I don't know if it works. I never install that feature.[/quote']This is new software that is gonna use a new nvidia cloud database to store all game info and all hardware info and autoconfigure your game profiles and drivers to get max quality from each game you have installed on your specific system according to your full hardware specs. Still pie in the sky' date=' but at least they are trying something new.[/quote']Ahh, hadn't heard of that. I can see the appeal of that as you wouldn't need to wait for new drivers to get new game support.

Fine tuning is always the way to go. All these auto OC'ing systems flat out get it wrong.

I love the Warcraft and Starcraft series as well. I'm a huge fan of RTS, much more than FPS. I have friends that also didn't like the Diablo series, but I absolutely loved them. Some of that love was wanting to get to the next stage to watch their cinematics. :)

Now those results explain a lot. I assume your CPU has hyperthreading which is why you have 8 cores showing up, and 4 of them pretty much unused. Those 4 nealry idle cores are bringing the average way down and skewing the results. If you average the values from the 4 most used cores, you get just over 17%.

Go to Start->Run and type in "perfmon". In the left pane, click on "Performance Monitor" which will start the gathering process. Above the graph, hit the pause button. Below the graph, right click on the default counter and select "Remove All Counters" (click OK). Then above the graph, click the + button which will open an "Add Counters" window. Scroll to "Processor", expand the group and select "% Processor Time". Below that is an area titled "Instances of selected object:". Select " and click the "Add >>" button. That will give you a counter for every CPU core, and one for "_Total". Clicking on any one of them while it's gathering statistics will show you the Last, Average, Minimum, and Maximum values in the appropriate boxes. Then click on the Instance counter for "_Total" and click on the Highlight button above the graph (looks like a pen). That will make the Total value in the graph bold. Then click the Play button above the graph and launch Skyrim. Do your normal testing, running around for a couple minutes, then exit Skyrim. Go to the Process Monitor window and hit the Pause button to stop gathering information. This is what it looks like on my system before starting the monitor:

I'll keep up with the forums, but that's about it for me as well. Have to get some D3 time in. :)

I didn't do any tweaks beyond your settings. With my usual setup, my average CPU usage is around 38%. I'd be curious to see results from perfmon for all of your CPU cores.

I used your nVidia settings and changed my AA/AF to match yours and I dropped 19% avg. Then disabled RCRN/ENB and it dropped to 17%. Then used your entire Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and dropped to 16%. Now that figure is somewhat misleading, as one core averaged about 25%, one 20%, one 15%, and one 10%. All of my tests were also running around Whiterun. But, I finally got down to an average of 8% by using your configs and loading into the world and just standing there, doing nothing.

That makes a little more sense, though I'm surprised at the 8% average. I'm guessing you have some of the quality settings turned down? What are you using for AA? Shadow quality? The 2% figure you can toss, that's when it started gathering data before TESV.exe launched. I did a test run with ugrids at default (5), ultra settings but with custom shadows. I got an average of 22% for total. And that number was in line with what I got from Windows perfmon. I also gathered data from each core, and two of them averaged 32%, and two averaged 16 - 17%.

What are you using to watch load? There is no way CPU utilization will be 2% while playing the game. It sounds more like you are alt-tabbing to the desktop and looking in Windows Task Manager, or some other tool, which will not show you the full utilization since the game then becomes a background process.

I recall having a turbo option on a motherboard at one time, but never used it. The biggest problem that you'll run into when motherboards attempt to automate OC (which I'm not sure if that is what this Turbo mode is doing), is that they pump the VCORE up too high which will shoot your temps up along with it.

When you say you are enabling Turbo, is that an option in the motherboard bios?

Yeah, that has to be either a mod conflict or ini setting causing the problem.

@Vond What CPU/Model do you have? Most intel CPU's thermal shutoff is 90C. If my CPU were getting to 85, I'd be freaking out. Hotter temps will stress the CPU and lower its life, and I'm a big believer in keeping as far away as possible from the thermal shutoff limit.

I've tried SMAA and I believe it to offer better quality than FXAA. I've never tried to use it with RCRN, so I'm not 100% sure, but I don't see why it couldn't be used as long as there was a way to proxy it with RCRN. But, if it's a low end card (I'm not that familiar with ATI cards), RCRN may not be right for your friend. He'd probably be better off using RLwC and either using the in-game FXAA, or standalone SMAA. AF will affect performance as well, just not as bad as AA. You'll have to experiment and see what kind of performance gains you can get by lowering it (assuming it's bad with 16x).

Bethesda could absolutely fix this issue if they took the time to update their engine. It's a shame they aren't addressing this as it ruins scene quality.

Another thing worth noting with these tweaks, is that when the sun position updates, the shadow transition is 100% smooth. NO flickering of the shadows at all. This is absolutely amazing to witness.

@Bealdwine I'm attaching the enbseries.ini file that I use if you want to try it out. Everything is disabled except shadows. I'd be curious to hear what the performance is like on your machine. Grab ENB 0.111, and you only need the d3d9.dll and enbinjector.ini files from the WrapperVersion folder, and then this enbseries.ini file. If you do try this out, be sure to set it to Read Only. enbseries.ini

Started with a default enbseries.ini file and cleared up my water issue. I've also tweaked the shadow settings in Skyrim and now have some amazing shadows with ENB. Check the update here .

And now I present to you, MEGA-AWESOME shadows using ENB. The following screenshots are of the same three locations as above. Including the screenshots of high quality shadows as previously taken for comparison. The change in appearance is due to me having a vanilla install. The previous images were shot with SRO textures and RCRN. Location 1 - Location 2 - Location 3 - To get these shadows, do the following: Launch Skyrim Launcher, and in Options set the shadow quality to medium. Close the options menu, and close the Skyrim Launcher.Edit SkyrimPrefs.ini and modify the following values: iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096 iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096 iShadowMapResolution=4096 You can keep set fShadowDistance=8000.0000 to increase shadow view distance, but the shadows will blur closer to you. Enjoy amazing shadows!

Did some testing with changing quality of the shadows, and I'm not seeing any difference. Tested with 1, 0, and -1 in enbseries.ini, and from low to ultra in Skyrim. Used screenshots and even video capture to compare.